Tuesday, 9 September 2014

Published by Jimmy Simond on Tuesday, 9 September 2014 |&nbspNo comments

Recent reports suggest that amidst the
growing concerns over privacy and a deal with Apple, DuckDuckGo has all the
needed potential to become a major player in search engine. Within a few days,
Apple will be launching its iOS8, which is the latest version of iPhone’s
mobile operating system. But this will come with a twist as one of the new
features in the operating system will be the user’s ability to select
DuckDuckGo as iPhone’s default search engine. This is nothing but a search
engine that focuses on smarter answers, real privacy and is less messy. So,
here’s a discussion on this brand new search engine for iPhone named
DuckDuckGo.

What is DuckDuckGo?

DuckDuckGo is a search engine, pretty like
Google but the only difference is that it depends less on a crawler and more on
external sources like Wikipedia, Yelp and WolframAlpha in order to generate
answers and recommended pages for your queries. DuckDuckGo ingests data from
other sources and still ranks the search results using its proprietary
algorithm that takes into account links, apparently even no-follow links since
Wikipedia is used as an authority link, and as a strong ranking signal.

Since it was introduced in 2008, DuckDuckGo
has already been steadily increasing its audience by about a billion searches,
but recently the decision to include it in the upcoming Apple operating system
will offer the much-needed encouragement and boost. But what does our survey
show?

Predictions of the growth of DuckDuckGo – Will privacy
concerns give a boost?

Well, out of 521 respondents, only 7% say
that they’ve heard of DuckDuckGo. Studies also revealed that 5% of respondents
have tried DuckDuckGo, though only 1.34% of them are daily users and only 0.78%
say that they use DuckDuckGo as their primary search engine. Surely, DuckDuckGo
would like for everyone to use it as their search engine but their primary
appeal to the users is that it can guarantee privacy to its users and majority
of the online users are pretty much concerned about their online privacy. In
fact, according to a survey, around 90% people have some level of concern about
their online privacy.

What most respondents don’t realize is that
Google ad networks consist of the largest ad network in the United States of America
as defined by all the unique visitors. 98% of respondents, who say that they’ve
used Google for some search query, have effectively piped their search history
directly onto an ad network. As a follow-up to some of their questions about
the user’s privacy concerns, the surveyers were curious to know whether or not
people would pay for it. While 83% of the respondents say that they wouldn’t
pay any fee for this ad-free search engine, 12% say that they would pay only $5
a month. On the other hand, 76% wouldn’t pay for a search engine that doesn’t
track them and 17% say they would up to $5 a month.

At some point of time, it is true that the users
would get rather irritated with having their online usage tracked and then they
might start paying attention to the different privacy advantages of DuckDuckGo.